Detailed information on the surviving members of the House of Representatives since 1949 is now available on this site. They include the members’ seats, parties, terms, dates of birth, ages and deaths.

All members of parliament who served in the first 18 parliaments from 1901 until the end of 1949 are now deceased.

There are two surviving members of the 19th Parliament that was elected on December 10, 1949. Both “forty-niners” are in their late 90s. One, Henry Pearce, will turn 100 in September this year.

Just four members of the House during the 1950s are still living.

For the entire Menzies era (1949-1972), there are 29 surviving members. All but four of them served together in the 27th Parliament between 1969 and 1972.

The table below provides a summary of how many members have served in the 19th to 45th parliaments. It shows how many are still living and what parties they belong to. There are links to more detailed information on each parliament since 1972.

Note: The data is structured around the parliaments since 1949. The numbers cannot be aggregated. Most surviving members served in more than one parliament.

Disclaimer: I am confident that the data shown here is correct. However, I rely on media reports and announcements in parliament for information on deaths of former members. I sincerely hope I haven’t killed or resurrected anyone. I am happy to receive corrections from readers.

This is a research paper from the Parliamentary Library with statistics on Australian Federal Elections since 1901.

The paper is part of the Research Paper Series 2014-15 and was written by Stephen Barber and Sue Johnson of the Statistics and Mapping Section of the Parliamentary Library.

The paper is shown under the terms of its Creative Commons licence.

It does not contains result of individual seats, but includes aggregate and state-by-state statistics for both Houses on primary votes, two-party-preferred votes, voter turnout, informal votes. It provides state-of-the-party tables for each House and Senate election since 1901. [Read more…]

Australia’s parliamentary elections are increasingly focused around perceptions and packaging of the leaders of the various parties.

The election of Senator Natasha Stott Despoja as the leader of the Australian Democrats in 2001 was an indication of the importance political parties place on leadership as a determinant of the voting patterns of electors.

Prime Minister John Howard’s attacks on Kim Beazley’s supposed lack of “ticker” in the 1998 election was another indication that Opposition leadership can be a factor in elections. [Read more…]

The table below shows the different categories of informal voting in the 1987 Federal Election.

The Australian Electoral Commission conducted a study of every informal vote cast in the election and came up with these statistics.

The figures show that nearly half of all informal votes were the result of some kind of incorrect numbering. This suggests that these informal votes were accidental. Similarly, another quarter of all informal votes contained ticks and crosses, suggesting confusion about the voting system.

Blank ballots and those with writing on them made up 26% of informal votes. These are most likely to have been deliberate.

The Hawke Labor government was re-elected to a third term at the Federal Election on July 11, 1987.

The government increased its majority with a net gain of 4 seats. It lost one seat each in New South Wales and Victoria. It picked up one seat each in Tasmania and the Northern Territory, and four seats in Queensland.

The ALP’s success in Queensland justified Hawke’s decision to call an early election to capitalise on the “Joh for PM” campaign by the Queensland Premier, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

This is how the ABC TV news in Melbourne reported on the election outcome: